The Tri-state battle over recreational weed began in 2017, when New Jersey voted in Governor Phil Murphy, a former Goldman Sachs higher-up who defeated his predecessor Chris Christie's lieutenant governor, Kim Guadagno, by vowing to fight against Donald Trump's policies, raise the minimum wage to $15, and legalize recreational marijuana as soon as possible. All within the first 100 days, he assured everybody.
Murphy has, in so many ways, proven his predecessor's opposite—he was Barack Obama's ambassador to Germany, and has pretty consistently professed a willingness to work with people as opposed to steamrolling them. He was swept in, evidently, as a direct rebuke to Christie, the brash, tell-it-as-it-is caricature who fell from grace and departed as the least popular governor in New Jersey history. And while a critical mass of legislators have so far failed to cohere around his campaign pledge to (quickly) legalize, that's not as disheartening to advocates as it might appear.
Earlier this week, the New Jersey bill just barely collapsed before an actual vote because of both predictable Republican opposition and intra-party squabbles among Democrats. It would have created a licensing system tilted to benefit the state's poorer areas, which are disproportionately black and disproportionately harmed by the drug war, and also allowed many drug offenders to clear their records or get out of prison or parole. The beefs raised against it ranged from moral and safety concerns (how to keep pot out of the hands of teenagers and drivers) to financial dilemmas to social-justice issues at the heart of the bigger debate about pot in America. After the legislation failed, Murphy, Democratic State Senate president Steve Sweeney, and Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin insisted they weren't worried. Progress, they claimed, had been made. Though it's still unclear how many votes short they were at the last minute, they certainly came closer than anyone in the state had before.